Samantha Frost

This seminar will constitute an experiment in ontological thinking about the human. It will draw on theories of materiality, post-humanism, the environment, affect, feminism, zoosemiosis, and various fields of the life sciences to push against the ideas of subjectivity and politics elaborated in theories of biopolitics. Through our readings and discussion, we will consider how the social and material environments that enter and transform human bodies might be thought as the matters or objects of non-neurological forms of perception. By extension, the response of human organisms to those forms of perception will be considered as specifically material and variously durable forms of affect. Focusing on the materiality of perception and affect and expanding what falls under their rubric, we will explore how to trace linkages between the aspiration to transform lived environments and the possibility of democratic forms of politics.

Indicative Reading List
Selections from works by Giorgio Agamben, Stacey Alaimo, Georges Canguilhem, David Chamovitz, Mel Chen, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Philippe Descola, Roberto Esposito, Alexander Galloway, Felix Guattari, Tim Ingold, Eduardo Kohn, Hannah Landecker, Becky Mansfield, Jose Munoz, Michel Serres, Michael Taussig, Jacob van Uexkull, Alexander Wehiliye, and Elizabeth Wilson.

James Martel

In Plato’s Republic, we are told that there is an analogy between the City and the Soul, that our interiority is as multiple and potentially disharmonious as the collectivity that forms the polis. Nominally, the purpose of the Republic is to produce an order that controls and regulates this potential anarchism. We are told that the philosopher king must rule the city and that reason must rule the soul. On the collective level, this advocates for some kind of archism; some rule or command, however benign or all-knowing the leadership. On the individual level, this amounts to a form of interpellation (as defined by Louis Althusser) that produces a form of subjectivity that is indeed subject, for being under the command of a central authority. Thus, as law is produced in the community, a subject is produced who is ready to obey and internalize that law. In this course, we will examine a way to subvert and complicate this form of authorization, a way that allows the anarchist subject—the intended object of interpellation—to resist that process via an operation that could be called misinterpellation.

The key theorist for this course will be Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche provides both a critique of the contemporary subject and a means by which to subvert and destroy that subjectivity. In part, he does this through his own radical take on theology. Because for Althusser the original subject (and source of interpellation) is God, a critical theology is required to address the occult theology that underlies the political subject. By providing us with a figure like Zarathustra, who appears messianic but who refuses to save (i.e interpellate) the subjects that he encounters, Nietzsche goes to the heart of the interpellating process and negates it. Nietzsche also offers a sense of what the subject is (if we can continue to use that ambiguous word) after she emerges out of the failure of interpellation. For Nietzsche, the subject is always multiple, always in conflict with herself. Yet rather than seeking to overcome this complexity in favor of some imposed harmony, Nietzsche welcomes that multiplicity as constituting the very self that the process of interpellation seeks to colonize and control.

We will examine texts by Nietzsche, Kafka, Benjamin and Fanon, in order to look at how interpellation can be resisted in ways both theological and political, as well as what understandings of subjectivity emerge when that great organizing principle of the self is disrupted. We will ask whether such individuals remain subjects of the law, or what law becomes when it is not correlated with interpellated identities. That is, we will learn what law becomes when it is anarchized, both at the level of the collectivity and the individual.

Indicative Reading List
Plato The Republic
Kafka Parables
Benjamin Critique of Violence
Althusser, Ideology and the State, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
Jacques Ranciere, On the Theory of Ideology: Althusser’s Politics, in Althusser’s Lesson
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Machiavelli, The Discourses
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Bernard Stiegler

This course will be dedicated to an interpretation of Marx’s and Engels’s philosophy of technics in the light of phenomenological (Husserl and Heidegger), post-phenomenological (Derrida, Simondon), anthropological (Leroi-Gourhan, Merlin Donald) and scientific questions – mainly thermodynamics and biology according to theories of entropy and negentropy (Schrödinger).

The aim of the course is to reconsider the contemporary forms of capitalism in the light of what will be described as a general organology, itself constituting the political question of a “pharmacology” (in the Derridean sense of the word “pharmakon”). The Anthropocene is often apprehended as the transformation of anthropogenesis by the capitalist industrial revolution. The process of automation provoked by the digitalization engages an acceleration that we will try to consider according to the concepts of Gestell and Ereignis, interpreted with the help of Rudolf Bœhm’s analysis.

Indicative Reading List
Marx and Engels, German ideology
Engels, Dialectic of nature
Husserl, The origin of geometry
Heidegger, Time and being
Heidegger, Identity and difference
Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and speech
Merlin Donald, Origin of the modern mind
Schrödinger, What is life?

More information coming soon

Samantha Frost

Dr. Iain MacKenzie is Co-Director of the Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent, and Senior Lecturer in the department of Politics and International Relations. His work centres on the idea of critique as a form of practical, theoretical and creative activity that reaches beyond the indifference that necessarily results from the mere to-and-fro of opinion. Regarding the classics of modern political thought and the contemporary classics of feminist political theory as rich sources of inventive, conceptually challenging and analytically powerful critical material, Dr MacKenzie’s work aims to bring this archive to bear upon contemporary social and political life. His books include The Idea of Pure Critique (2004, Continuum), Politics: Key Concepts in Philosophy (2009, Continuum), and, with R. Porter, Dramatizing the Political: Deleuze and Guattari (2011, Palgrave).

There are in numerous examples, both in literature and real life, where a dead body, perceived to be an enemy of the state, is left unburied, unattended to and in plain sight. Recently in the United States, we have the example of Michael Brown left dead in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. In literature, there is the famous example of Polynices, left unburied by his uncle Creon in the play Antigone. Normally such a display is seen as a sign of the state’s power, its contempt for its enemies, and an example of the state’s trampling of human rights (which are in turn seen as a bulwark against this kind of power). In my talk I will make a different claim; that in leaving bodies unburied, the state is demonstrating not its strength but its vulnerability. Working off Walter Benjamin’s insight that the corpse is the body when it is freed from projections of identity and agency, I argue that the unburied body possesses a subversive power, a power to break with projection of state authority and interpellation. Rather than argue that this is a vindication of human rights, I will argue that the very idea of human rights partakes in the language and imagery of sovereignty, a projection which is equally resisted by the dead body as the idea of absolute state power. The unburied body offers an opportunity to see the state at its most vulnerable. it shows the counter power of human beings, not as bearers of universal principles and rights (of which the state is then necessarily the protector) but of their own agency, their possession of an anarchic power that is visible each time the state shows both its contempt for its victims and its inability to project beyond a body that is animated by its own phantasms.

James Martel

More information coming soon

Bernard Stiegler